As used herein, a “broadcast” refers to any sort of electronic transmission of any sort of media signal(s) from a source to one or more receiving devices of any kind. Thus, a “broadcast” may be a cable broadcast, a satellite broadcast, a terrestrial broadcast, a traditional free television broadcast, a radio broadcast, and/or an internet broadcast, and a “broadcaster” may be any entity that transmits signals for reception by a plurality of receiving devices. The signals may include media content (also referred to herein as “content” or “programs”), and/or commercials (also referred to herein as “advertisements”). An “advertiser” is any entity that provides an advertisement for broadcast. Traditionally, advertisers have paid broadcasters to interleave commercial advertisements with broadcast content (e.g., in a serial “content-commercial-content-commercial” format) such that, to view an entire program of interest, the audience is expected to view the interleaved commercials. This approach enables broadcasters to supply free programming to the audience while collecting fees for the programming from sponsoring advertisers.
To facilitate this sponsorship model, companies that rely on broadcast video and/or audio programs for revenue, such as advertisers, broadcasters and content providers, wish to know the size and demographic composition of the audience(s) that consume program(s). Merchants (e.g., manufacturers, wholesalers and/or retailers) also want to know this information so they can target their advertisements to the populations most likely to purchase their products. Audience measurement companies have addressed this need by, for example, identifying the demographic composition of a set of statistically selected households and/or individuals (i.e., panelists) and the program consumption habits of the member(s) of the panel. For example, audience measurement companies may collect viewing data on a selected household by monitoring the content displayed on that household's television(s) and by identifying which household member(s) are present in the room when that content is displayed. An analogous technique is applied in the radio measurement context.
Gathering this audience measurement data has become more difficult as the diversity of broadcast systems has increased. For example, while it was once the case that television broadcasts were almost entirely terrestrial based, radio frequency broadcast systems (i.e., traditional free television), cable and satellite broadcast systems have now become commonplace. Further, these cable and/or satellite based broadcast systems often require the use of a dedicated receiving device such as a set top box (STB) or an integrated receiver decoder (IRD) to tune, decode, and/or display broadcast programs. To complicate matters further, some of these receiving devices for alternative broadcast systems as well as other receiving devices such as local media playback devices (e.g., video cassette recorders, digital video recorders, and/or personal video recorders) have made time shifted viewing of broadcast and other programs possible.
This ability to record and playback programming (i.e., time-shifting) has raised concerns in the advertising industry that consumers employing such time shifting technology will skip or otherwise fast forward through commercials when viewing recorded programs, thereby undermining the effectiveness of the traditional interleaved advertising model. To address this issue, rather than, or in addition to, interleaving commercials with content, merchants and advertisers have begun paying content creators a fee to place their product(s) within the content itself. For example, a manufacturer of a product (e.g., sunglasses) might pay a content creator a fee to have their product appear in a broadcast program (e.g., to have their sunglasses worn by an actor in the program) and/or to have their product mentioned by name during the program. It will be appreciated that the sunglasses example is merely illustrative and any other product or service of interest could be integrated into the programming in any desired fashion (e.g., if the product were a soft drink, an advertiser may pay a fee to have a cast member drink from a can displaying the logo of the soft drink).
Along similar lines, advertisers have often paid to place advertisements such as billboards, signs, etc. in locations from which broadcasting is likely to occur such that their advertisements appear in broadcast content. Common examples of this approach are the billboards and other signs positioned throughout arenas used to host sporting events, concerts, political events, etc. Thus, when, for example, a baseball game is broadcast, the signs along the perimeter of the baseball field (e.g., “Buy Sunshine Brand Sunglasses”) are likewise broadcast as incidental background to the sporting event.
Due to the placement of the example sunglasses in the program and/or due to the presence of the example advertisement signage at the location of the broadcast event, the advertisement for the sunglasses and/or the advertisement signage (collectively and/or individually referred to herein as “embedded advertisement”) is embedded in the broadcast content, rather than in a commercial interleaved with the content. Consequently, it is not possible for an audience member to fast forward or skip past the embedded advertisement without also fast forwarding or skipping past a portion of the program in which the advertisement is embedded. As a result, it is believed that audience members are less likely to skip the advertisement and, conversely, that audience members are more likely to view the advertisement than in the traditional interleaved content-commercial(s)-content-commercial(s) approach to broadcast advertising.
The advertising approach of embedding a product in content is referred to herein as “intentional product placement,” and products placed by intentional product placement are referred to herein as “intentionally placed products.” It will be appreciated that content may include intentionally placed products (i.e., products that are used as props in the content in exchange for a fee from an advertiser and/or merchant) and unintentionally placed products. As used herein, “unintentionally placed products” are products that are used as props in content by choice of the content creator without payment from an advertiser or merchant. Thus, an unintentionally placed product used as a prop is effectively receiving free advertisement, but may have been included for the purpose of, for example, story telling and not for the purpose of advertising.
Similarly, the advertising approach of locating a sign, billboard or other display advertisement at a location where it is expected to be included in a broadcast program such as a sporting event is referred to herein as “intentional display placement,” and advertising displays of any type which are placed by intentional display placement are referred to herein as “intentionally placed displays.” It will be appreciated that content may include intentionally placed displays (i.e., displays that were placed to be captured in a broadcast) and unintentionally placed displays (i.e., displays that are not intended by the advertiser to be captured in content, but, due to activity by a content creator, they are included incidentally in the content through, for example, filming a movie or television show in Times Square, filming a live news story on a city street adjacent a billboard or store front sign, etc.). Additionally, as used herein “intentionally placed advertisement” generically refers to any intentionally placed product and/or any intentionally placed display. Analogously, “unintentionally placed advertisement” generically refers to any unintentionally placed product and/or any unintentionally placed display.
The brand information (e.g., such as manufacturer name, distributor name, provider name, product/service name, catch phrase, etc.), as well as the visual appearance (e.g., such as screen size, screen location, occlusion, image quality, venue location, whether the appearance is static or changing (e.g., animated), whether the appearance is real or a virtual overlay, etc.) and/or audible sound of the same included in an embedded advertisement (e.g., such as an intentional or unintentional product placement, display placement or advertising placement) is referred to herein as a “brand identifier” or, equivalently, a “logo” for the associated product and/service. For example, in the case of an intentional display placement of a sign proclaiming “Buy Sunshine Brand Sunglasses” placed along the perimeter of a baseball field, the words and general appearance of the phrase “Buy Sunshine Brand Sunglasses” comprise the brand identifier (e.g., logo) corresponding to this intentional display placement.